Masters of Horror, episode 3: Dance of the Dead (Tobe Hooper, 2005)
Tobe Hooper’s work has always been uneven. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is of course the original modern slasher movie (although the movies of Herschell Gordon Lewis in the 60s came first, they were not even close to as grueling). It’s no secret that I’m not a huge fan of slasher movies, but TCM has an intensity beneath the rough look and low production values that’s very real, and very unsettling even today. Poltergeist is one of my favorite horror crossover movies, although Hooper’s exact involvement with it is somewhat disputed. And, unlike some people, I liked The Toolbox Murders quite a bit, at least the supernatural non-slasher parts of it.
On the other hand, he’s also made some really bad movies, so I was uncertain what to expect of Dance of the Dead, the third installment in the Masters of Horror series. As it turns out, it’s not bad, although it has problems. In the near future, chemical warfare and terrorist chemical attacks have killed millions of people in the US, and disfigured and scarred many more. Society is falling apart, anarchy reigns, and as usual when anarchy reigns, there are seedy nightclubs, people in leather and latex sporting piercings, and a whole lot of drugs.
You may have heard that this is a zombie story, but that’s not really true. There are reanimated dead in it, but their reanimation is a side-effect of chemical agents, and they’re not aggressive or cannibalistic. Instead, it’s the story of an overprotective, secretly evil mother, and her daughter, who wants out, and falls in love with a young criminal. On the way, daughter discovers what really happened to her rebellious older sister, and mother’s dark secrets.
Apart from the fact that this is basically Cool as Ice in the post-apocalyptic future with zombies, it works fairly well. The mother overacts, people’s motivations aren’t always clear, and the inevitable twist isn’t so amazingly shocking as you’d like it to be, but in general it’s a decent story. There’s also a scene of the reanimated dead being coldly dispatched into a dumpster and set on fire, which is quite effective and concentration camp-like, but it would have been better if Hooper didn’t try to milk it for emotional effect quite so much. As it is, something that could have been chilling and uncomfortable becomes exploitative and a bit cheap. And speaking of exploitative and cheap, there’s an enormous amount of naked tits in this movie, both reanimated and otherwise, and I think Robert Englund gets a blowjob from a reanimated corpse at one point. Possibly a little excessive, I think.
But why is there a horrible visual effect, a sort of splitting of the image into several superimposed versions which then shake around for a second, accompanied by a screechy sound, that gets used all the time? It’s literally used at least once per minute, and it happens equally in a quiet dialogue scene as in the climactic scenes of the dead dancing. Did someone get a new Shake plugin to play with? I found myself shouting “Fucking stop it!” at the screen several times, through gritted teeth.
But all in all, I think this is the best Masters of Horror episode so far. The setting and concept are original and decently interesting, and it held my attention. It’s far from perfect, but it’s definitely watchable.